wearable computers

Transparent solar panels — think about it for a moment: Sheets of glass or transparent plastic films that also generate electricity. It’s almost the perfect solution for all our energy needs, generating free power from every available surface, window, and computer display.

With products like Google’s Glass, the Oculus Rift, and even certain features found on the Nintendo 3DS, augmented, mixed, and virtual reality are starting to make some headway into the consumer space. Canon, best known for its cameras, is looking to break into the mixed reality scene with its new head-mounted display.

Google recently released a new video showing what looking through its wearable computer, Google Glass, would be like. Unfortunately, the only exciting thing we’ve seen about the device, now seemingly called Glass, so far are the social activities showcased in the video — sky diving, playing with a boa, flying planes upside-down — and not the ways Glass was used in conjunction with them.

This past weekend, rumors made their way into the wild that Apple is looking to add a watch to its line of iDevice products. However impressive or sleek an iWatch would end up being, would it really be a good idea for Apple to get into the wristwatch game?

Researchers at the University of Maryland, College Park have printed transparent transistors on transparent paper. The finished device is flexible, up to 84% transparent, and in theory this could be the first step towards green, paper-based electronics.

Chemical and nanoengineers at Rice University have become the first team to create long (hundreds of meters), macroscopic, mass-producible carbon nanotube thread. This thread is about the thickness of a human hair, but has the conductivity of metal and the strength of carbon fiber. If you were looking for a material to fuel smart clothing and other digital textiles, this is it.

Six months after their spectacular unveil, Google is about to send the first round of augmented reality Google Glass devices to developers. Developers will pay $1,500 for the privilege of receiving an early, prototype version of Google Glass, but the polished consumer version — due in 2014 — should be a lot cheaper.

An international team of engineers, physicists, and chemists have created the first fiber-optic solar cell. These fibers are thinner than human hair, flexible, and yet they produce electricity, just like a normal solar cell. The US military is already interested in weaving these threads into clothing, to provide a wearable power source for soldiers.

Intel’s push towards ubiquitous computing and the zero-cost of “meaningful” compute is noteworthy, but it goes against what the company has said in other contexts. Even if we manage to cut power consumption on the CPU, other device functions are less adjustable.

German material scientists from Kiel University and the Hamburg University of Technology have created the world’s lightest material, dubbed aerographite. One cubic centimeter of aerographite weighs just 0.2 milligrams, which is four times lighter than the previous record holder, and six times lighter than air.

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